RESTAURANTS, PUBS AND CAFES

Restaurants, pubs and cafés typically place larger orders than households and have a higher demand for speciality produce. Depending on your area, demand can be consistent throughout the year, or peak in the summer when fresh produce is most abundant and the tourism season is at its height. Restaurants are often willing to pay more for fresh, local and speciality produce that they can’t source from a wholesaler.

In many cases restaurants, pubs and cafés will prefer to order on a monthly, weekly or bi-weekly basis from an availability list. However some farms have succeeded in establishing relationships with more commitment, where restaurants commit to a specified minimum weekly spend, or where the farmers and growers send a ‘share’ based on what’s in season up to a specified value. In the case of meat many chefs will want a high volume of certain cuts, but other restaurants, particularly those where chefs have control over the menu and change it regularly, may be interested in whole carcases for butchery in-house.

Many producers supplying restaurants, pubs and cafés advise getting chefs onto the holding where possible to show the set up and explore the produce available. In many cases chefs will be interested in produce that would be undesirable to households. Growers also advise keeping your own production priorities in mind before offering to grow produce specifically for a specific chef as demand, personnel and restaurant management can change from one season to another. However, creating direct relationships with chefs can bring other benefits to the farm including options for on farm events and meals.

In many cases the stress and time pressures of commercial kitchens, combined with the expectations of customers, mean chefs will be less tolerant of dirty, low quality or erratic supply of produce and will favour well presented produce that requires minimal cleaning before use.

If you do decide to start supplying a restaurant, you may find the following experiences from other growers and farmers helpful:

Advice to Small Scale Farmers Wishing to Work With Restaurants, Female Farmer UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6KBUamcNgU

“Growing and Selling Fresh-Cut Herbs” by Sandie Shores is an excellent book that covers selling to restaurants among many other topics, and although it is specifically about herbs, not the newest, and comes from an American context, it has lots of common sense advice on business set up and marketing that is also useful for UK growers.

Advantages

 * Larger orders than households and demand for higher value produce.
 * May only need small quantities of products relative to wholesale customers.
 * Fewer deliveries and less packing than box schemes.
 * Opportunity to work with chefs to influence menu towards what is seasonally abundant.
 * Opportunities to produce more speciality products.

Disadvantages

 * Chefs can be notoriously finicky and may have particular packaging, cutting and portion requirements.
 * Chefs may only want to work with certain cuts of meat.
 * Produce must be consistent and reliable.